Skip to main content
Mary Wilson

faculty

Mary Wilson, PhD

Associate Professor

English & Communication

Contact

508-999-8273

nxjmtpo5Avnbtte/fev

Balsam Hall 9167

Education

University of Massachusetts, AmherstPhD
University of Massachusetts, AmherstMA
The College of William and MaryBA

Teaching

Programs

Teaching

Courses

A study of selected readings dealing with a special topic chosen by the instructor. Recent special topics include New England Literature, Children's Literature, the Artist in Literature, Black Music, and Black Literature. May be repeated with change of content. Cross-listed as BLS 200; LST 200.

A survey of literature written by people living in Great Britain, Ireland, and the historical British Empire from the late 18th century through the present day. Students will be introduced to major literary movements of this period, including Romanticism, Victorian realism, sensation fiction, modernism, postcolonial literature, and contemporary literature.

A study of the major English writers of nonfiction from 1832-1900, covering some prose nonfiction (Carlyle, Ruskin, Mill), but emphasizing such poets as Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Rossetti, Swinburne, Meredith, Hopkins, and Housman.

British fiction written between 1900 and the present. Students will examine the development of the novel and the short story form. Writers studies may include Conrad, Lawrence, Woolf, Joyce, Mansfield, Forster, Rhys, Ford, Spark, Murdoch, Phillips, Rushdie, Kureishi, Ishiguro, McEwan, and Smith.

Research

Research interests

  • Modernism
  • Fiction
  • Poetry
  • 19th and 20th Century British Literature
  • Women’s Studies and Queer Theory

Mary Wilson earned her PhD in English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2009. She taught at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, VA, for five years before returning to the UMass system in 2014.  Her research focuses on early 20th century British fiction and on representations of domesticity in modernist literature. She is the author of The Labors of Modernism: Domesticity, Servants, and Authorship in Modernist Fiction (Ashgate, 2013), which argues for greater attention to the role of domestic servants in the development of experimental modernist forms.  She also co-edited Rhys Matters: New Critical Perspectives (Palgrave, 2013), a collection of essays on the work of the Anglo-Caribbean modernist writer Jean Rhys.  Dr Wilson teaches courses on British literature after 1798, place and space in literature, and literary theory and criticism.